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able hottie. He does it because that life is too small. He is both too
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genetically you have nearly as much in common
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the United States, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
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living since The Art of War. By Dylan Young
It’s debatable whether John Hughes knew what he
was doing when he wrote, directed and produced the film.
He was the pioneer of a new cultural trope – the wry
alienated teen flick – and by ’86, the industry’s golden boy
with his thumb on the Walkman-calibrated pulse of the
nation’s ripest demographic.
But Ferris Bueller is not the typical John Hughes
protagonist. Sure, he is wry, clever and dialled-into the
ephemera of counter-culture. But he is also popular, gre-
garious, and well adjusted. He is in many ways everything
the typical Hughes icon isn’t. Ferris is out of compliance
with the Hughesian norm, an anti-hero to the belea-
guered Duckys, Benders and Samanthas.
Though Ferris’s ideological leanings tap those of his
peers, he’s not disaffected or pigeon-holed by them. He is
inscrutable and eclectic. He’s not associated with any par-
ticular camp. He is not a jock, a freak, a dweeb, a burnout,
a flake or a prom queen. He’s bits of all of them. More
importantly, he doesn’t skip school because he’s bad at it,
terrified of being pantsed, or crushing on the unattain-
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competent to gain from that world and too childlike to endure it.
So, in a bound of logic so unwaveringly pragmatic that most adults
couldn’t even actualize it, he simply decides not to.
In orchestrating his emancipation, he draws on a well of talent
and industry. He’s obviously not above doing a little hard work
to get his day at Wrigley. First, he has to hard-sell his Eeyore-
like friend Cameron to join him. Then he blindsides his nemesis
Edward Rooney, duping him into excusing his girlfriend, Sloane,
all while hacking the high school computer. It’s the proactive ap-
proach at play (literally). And this is just the prep. He hasn’t even
left home yet.
What he does with his well-earned freedom, reads like, well,
something out of this very magazine: he drives a beautiful and
unbelievably rare car; he goes to a day game at one of the last true
outdoor baseball stadiums; he goes to the stock exchange, to the
Art Institute, to the tallest building in Chicago, and to the beach;
he eats sweetbreads at a fashionable restaurant, soaks in a hot
tub and hijacks a parade. In short, Ferris behaves exactly as we all
should – living life like we mean it.
Hughes sketched teen life as an analog to the adult one. His
teens are separated from us only by the thinnest of conceits. Like
us, they are burdened by ungainly tests, obstacles, social constraints
and expectations. And like us, they often don’t do much to address
it. Ferris, on the other hand, deploys every cell of his being, every
talent and skill, to do just that.
The film was catharsis for Hughes, the last teen film he’d direct.
He now declines all interviews, living a secluded life in Wisconsin,
like a latter day Salinger. The likes of Buffy, The OC, Veronica Mars,
Gossip Girl, even The Hills owe much to Hughes. But Hughes never
embraced the commodification of teendom and he was nonplussed
by it. Even the successful can feel out of step with their lives. So,
like Ferris, Hughes simply stepped out.
There’s no reason to follow the slow downward suck of the daily
grind, become just another gray flannel (I should say, business casual)
victim of the mundane. It happens. Life loses its glamour. Routine is
easier than being your own hero. I’m not going to mine the causes.
Suffice it to say, you can spend a lifetime tending to the garden and
never take the time to live in it. Life gets away from you.
It doesn’t have to.
Ferris is there to remind us of the things we’ve lost in transit, of
the ends fuelling the means. He does this by parsing what is and
isn’t of value to his life and putting the extra effort where it counts.
The power of an archetype like Ferris isn’t necessarily a literal
one. We love the potential, the nearly attainable fantasy of the
character. Nobody is stopping bullets with their mind or turn-
ing back time. Ferris is the man precisely because he doesn’t do
the impossible. There’s nothing superhuman about him, except,
maybe, his ability to anticipate. It may look like he’s pulling rabbits
out of his Air Cavalry beret but only because he’s distracting us
with the other hand. His “superpower” is a very concrete one. He
simply makes the best possible, most dynamic, of barely available
outcomes seem accessible.
It is.
If you always wanted to fly a plane or move to Morocco, make a
film or play the electric bass, surf the coast of Bali or date a model,
eat blowfish or drive a Tesla, or even if (for some odd reason) you
want to sing in a parade…. What are you waiting for?
Like the kid says, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and
look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
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